Approaches to Literary Readings of Ancient Jewish Writings

In this volume twelve contributions discuss the relevance, accuracy, potential, and possible alternatives to a literary reading of ancient Jewish writings, especially the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on different academic fields (biblical studies, rabbinic studies, and literary studies) and on various methodologies (literary criticism, rhetorical criticism, cognitive linguistics, historical criticism, and reception history), the essays form a state-of-the-art overview of the current use of the literary approach toward ancient Jewish texts. The volume convincingly shows that the latest approaches to a literary reading can still enhance our understanding of these texts.

Biographical note

Klaas Smelik, Ph.D. (1977), Ghent University, is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at that university. He has published monographs and articles on Hebrew Epigraphy, Hebrew Bible, Biblical Hebrew, Jewish Studies, Ancient History and Religious Studies, including Converting the Past (1992).

Karolien Vermeulen is Research and Teaching Assistant Hebrew at Ghent University and Research Fellow at the Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp. She has published several articles on wordplay, metaphor, and related phenomena in the Hebrew Bible.

In The Qumran Manuscripts of Lamentations, Gideon Kotzé draws on text-critical analyses to establish how the content of the biblical book differs in the four Lamentations manuscripts from Qumran when compared to the Masoretic text and the ancient translations.

In Understanding Participant-Reference Shifts in the Book of Jeremiah methodological reflections lead to a text-phenomenological investigation of the origins and functions of participant-reference shifts.

In The Role of Zion/Jerusalem in Isaiah 40–55 Reinoud Oosting offers a linguistic and literary analysis of the Biblical Hebrew text of Isaiah 40-55, focusing on the depiction of Zion/Jerusalem in these chapters.

Fokkelman presents the Hebrew and the English text of Job in its original contours and proportions (412 strophes, 165 stanzas), weighs the poet’s precision (who counted his syllables on all text levels) and redraws the portrait of the hero: integrity vindicated.

This volume in honour of Eep Talstra focusses on the function of tradition in the formation and reception of the Bible, and the role of the innovations brought about by ICT in reconsidering existing interpretations of texts, grammatical concepts, and lexicographic practices.

Each of the four chapters of the book focuses on a different aspect of the division between Judah and Israel: between the Northern and Southern prophets, between the Jacob and Abraham narratives, between the Exodus and the Zion traditions and the circumstances of unification.

Drawing on the insights of functional grammar and cognitive semantics, this book offers a detailed linguistic analysis of Job 12-14 and a fresh exegetical reading of Job's longest and central speech in the book.

This book provides an exhaustive analysis of the semantic domain of ‘gift’ in Ancient Hebrew. The investigation focuses on the single lexemes and provides an overall picture of the developments of the lexical field across the linguistic layers of Ancient Hebrew.

Following an extensive study of Ezekiel 18 and 20, this book offers a redefinition and a new theoretical basis for the concept of corporate personality. This theory is subsequently applied to Ezekiel 18 and 20 to analyze the collective and individual features.